


Possession

by Nununununu



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: (mild), (of a kind), Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Ghosts, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Memory Issues, Memory Loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:28:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26579104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nununununu/pseuds/Nununununu
Summary: A ghost follows Bodhi to the Rebel base.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	Possession

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Guinevak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guinevak/gifts).



> Mild warning for what could be read as either the expectation of not surviving or as brief, non-graphic suicidal intent.
> 
> (Originally posted 31/10; re-dated for author reveals)

His ghost is always with him.

Bodhi recovers more slowly than those around him might think. It’s okay though; they all have issues. He’s not the only one who wakes up screaming, and it’s reassuring to have Jyn and her baton nearby in the next tiny room.

He’s not used to having his own room, even one small enough it only fits in a low lumpy bunk, a lone shelf and a container for his few changes of clothes. He’s got a few projects he’s been tampering with strewn around, although he always means to be tidy – a few parts that ended up in his pockets from when he was working on a ship down in the hangar bay.

He brought them back up to his room to have something to do with his hands in the small hours. The very late hours, when it seems like even the other screamers are finally asleep. He might wander out of his room and pad down the silent corridors and find Cassian back from some undercover mission or Baze standing as if on guard by one of the exits to the base, the latter with a perhaps excessive number of guns – something Bodhi can’t help but find bolstering – and the former with a shallow smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

He could seek them out.

But in those small hours, when the darkness seems to encroach on everything even more than it usually does, the door to Bodhi’s room seems to become an impenetrable barrier and it feels impossible to leave.

He knows this is foolish.

He knows that, as he jerks awake for the umpteenth time, panting wide-eyed and sightless into that darkness, that Bor Gullet is not still with him. That it died, along with Jedha. But just as the echoes of his past haunt him along with his mistakes, so does it.

It is there forever, after all, in his brain.

It’s a form of immortality, perhaps, for Bor Gullet. Bodhi reaches for a memory and finds a bite taken out of it. Goes to complete a simple task and it’s there – cold, slick tentacles curling around his vulnerable insides. Nestling up behind his thoughts when he goes to speak and – oh, he can’t stop himself from _smelling_ it, whenever he breathes.

He tries to get used to speaking around the sense of it watching him, waiting, lurking in the corner of wherever he is on the base. From feeling like he can’t string words together without the chance they might become pleas. From grasping – grasping – struggling to reclaim something he’s lost.

He doesn’t know what that is.

He doesn’t know what that is, but he’s sure others see it on him – that they see this mark that’s been left on his mind in places of the parts that once were _him_. He has some of those left. Enough to get by, enough to fake it most – some – a bit – of the time. The situation around him desperate enough that people mostly don’t question it.

Mostly they avoid him, apart from his team. He has his team. Somehow. Somehow he still has them. He’s going to stick by them until his ghost has stolen every bite it can and there’s nothing of him left.

Even then. Even then –

He would die for them. Even if, sometimes, when he goes to reply to a sardonic prediction K-2SO comes out with or a dry joke Baze pretends he doesn’t say, or a witty comment Chirrut makes even as he tilts his head towards Bodhi as if in concern –

Bodhi would die for them even if he has flashes when he can’t remember who these people are. Who he is.

He is becoming his own ghost, it seems.

And still it is with him. Jyn talks and rages and fails to convince command to act. Cassian gains further shadows under his eyes and decides to break orders. Bodhi can, will, is determined to pilot the ship.

This is something he can do. He will take his ghost with him.

And if it didn’t die on Jedha, those parts of Bor Gullet still somehow living inside and around him –

It can die on Scarif.


End file.
